Is AI democratized yet?
Big Questions
Is this the decade for artificial intelligence boom? Are AI system reliable for generic consumer technology adoption? Will AI transform customer experience the way Internet did in the 90s? Is AI the Internet of the 90s?
Artificial intelligence has been around for a few decades now, in many forms. 'Google predicts your next search term', 'Amazon predicts you're next shopping', 'IBM predicts your medicine need' are common phrases amongst today's customers. AI services have gone from 'creepy' to 'wow, it knows' in a short span of a few years.
AI's proliferation into consumer technology has grown rapidly but the examples listed above indicate a trend. AI in consumer technology has been confined to services offered by the large corporations. The 'main street' stores are yet to have the ability to adopt AI. Will this happen in the coming decade?
The term 'democratizing' has a two-fold meaning. First is the general availability of AI based services. Google Cloud, AWS, IBM's Watson, Microsoft's Azure are key leading players. Second is the ease of application development using the AI based commercial services.
Ease for consumer facing businesses to apply AI.
Businesses should start with a checklist of items that AI systems can help with. Every day processes like employee time cards to monthly tasks like ordering supplies to annual tasks like preparing books can have an AI component. Start with a checklist and search for AI services that will help ease the current process.
As for the startups adopting AI services, the big question of AI system's reliability remains. Startups and small application development teams will count on the unsupervised learning of the AI systems to keep up or improve the experience. Applying AI system to solve the problems at hand is unlike traditional programing. The repeatability of tasks is a function of the AI system's determinism.
Customer experience is better with AI
Customer focus and experience is the key for any business. It is often said that you cannot make every single customer happy. With AI, you can get closer to the customization that's make most if not all your customers happy. AI, if applied in the correct manner, will help bridge the gap (time, employee, money, etc) that will satisfy additional customers. This below quote from Sergey can be extrapolated to all-things that a business needs to do to serve their customer.
“If you had all of the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.” – Sergey Brin
AI complements Humans
'Democratization' of AI is bound to happen. This is even recognized by greatest of the world leaders. Democratization however is often seen as a threat, to humans. This however need not be so. In the past many years of AI system's proliferation in consumer technology are examples to learn from. A balances approach, highlighing complementing solutions, will go a long way to improve our customer experience.
“We’ve been seeing specialized AI in every aspect of our lives, from medicine and transportation to how electricity is distributed, and it promises to create a vastly more productive and efficient economy … But it also has some downsides that we’re gonna have to figure out in terms of not eliminating jobs. It could increase inequality. It could suppress wages.” - Barack Obama